Archive for March, 2005

In my more pessimistic moments I am sometimes inclined to imagine that the historical profession, instead of moving steadily forward through experience and self-criticism to deeper understanding and steadier, more penetrating vision, just swings aimlessly back and forth with the tides of fashion, like the ladies garment industry. Even before the turn of the century, though history was emphatically still part politics, and international politics perhaps its most reputable branch, the deeper thinkers were in revolt against narrative, and exhorting their colleagues to break its drowsy spell. Already a growing faction of social and economic historians were telling each other that the occupants of the more famous and better paid chairs were incapable of seeing beneath the surface to the real currents of history. Before long, some of them already occupants of those coveted chairs, the vanguard were saying loudly that military and diplomatic history were idle and frivolous when they were not positively immoral, and that even political history was no better unless it exposed the molding of movements and institutions by the vast impersonal forces of social change. By the 1920s this fashion in history was everywhere triumphant, but already its champions could feel their heels being trodden on by hungry young men who despised materialism and positivism, Darwin and Dewey and Marx, and flaunted the mystiques of élans vitals and autonomously developing systems of ideas. Their turn came, and for the past fourteen years the dominant fashion has been some form of what we seem determined to call ”intellectual history.” … I have no guess as to how long the present phase may last or what will follow, but like womens fashions, fashions in history have only a limited number of ways to go. Perhaps military and diplomatic history may come back again, especially if the cold war ever thaws, and war and diplomacy cease to be such painful subjects.

The appearance of this essay elicited more spontaneous reactions than anything else I have ever written, including books. One scholar summed up the tone of much of the correspondence that came in: “It speaks to my condition.”

*Full citation for the quotation (from Kammen’s footnote): Garrett Mattingly, “Some Revisions of the Political History of the Renaissance,” in The Renaissance, ed. Tinsley Helton (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 9.

I’m putting together a longer post on the problem of specialization vs grand narrative in history, but with the end of the term coming up it may be a while before I finish it. In the meantime, I’ll just post a few thoughts here:

To sum up very briefly: Schama argues that academic history is too specialized and too obsessed with footnotes, and calls for a return to some golden age of narrative history-writing; Timothy Burke points out that broadly written histories aimed at the public could not be written without the detailed research that goes into monographs, but that historians indeed should nevertheless work on writing more “broadly communicative” histories; the Invisible Adjunct and Kieran Healy both point out the problems with idealizing some past “golden age”; the original posters and various commenters complain about the contraints created by the norms of graduate education and tenure and promotion committees; everything settles down after a while.

None of this is all that remarkable. The complaint is quite an old one: I could probably do a whole additional post on The Historian’s Craft summarizing what Marc Bloch had to say about specialization and synthesis. Indeed, Schama himself actually published a longer article on this very topic back in 1991. If you have access to the New York Times historical database you can read it here.

What is remarkable about this particular discussion, however, is that – though he was still critical of academic history – Simon Schama never actually said most of what the Independent attributed to him.

If you clicked on the link to the article, you probably noticed that it’s now available only to subscribers. As I am not one, I had to go back through Lexis-Nexis to look it up. (Sorry, Lexis-Nexis doesn’t seem to do permalinks. Update: Thanks to Sharon, you can find the article here.) While doing so, I happened to come across the following letter to the editor, dated one week after the original article (29 Feb 2004):

HEADLINE: LETTER: HISTORY HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER

BYLINE: SIMON SCHAMA

BODY:
Contrary to the headline “History just isn’t what it used to be: Schama slams academic historians”, (22 February), I most certainly did not “slam” academic historians in the interview I gave on the three- part BBC4 series Historians of Genius for which I provide brief introductions. In fact, when egged on to say something of this sort, I was at pains to say what I believe, namely that we are now in something of a golden age of narrative writing and that more history which combines scholarship of the highest level with narrative craft is being written than ever before. Antony Beevor was just one of a long list of names – including Cannadine, Colley, Brewer, Tillyard, Jardine, Ferguson – whose work I want to celebrate. Nor (since a leader in your paper took me to task on this) did I say anything, or indeed have anything, against footnotes; and in the same interview I went out of my way to sing the praises of Gibbon’s footnotes, which are things of stunning erudition, elegance and mischievous wit.